The Eternity Project

12

KHAN YUNIS, GAZA CITY, PALESTINE



3 years ago

The room was dark. She couldn’t see because of the blindfold bound tightly around her head, but somehow she knew. There was no way to mark the passage of time. Here and now was all that mattered. Nothing, and nobody else.

She had long ago paced the perimeter of her tiny patch of loneliness and knew it to be precisely eight feet square. She knew also that this tiny space was built deliberately to be small enough to feel claustrophobic, but large enough that she could not touch the opposing walls at the same time with her hands and feet. If her hands weren’t lied, that might have allowed her to shimmy up to the small opening nine feet above her head where a faint breeze drifted in from outside, and the people who had incarcerated her here were clearly not willing to let that happen.

Her hands were bound behind her back with tough plastic cords, far too strong to break. The plastic had once cut deep and painful grooves into her wrists, but the skin there had long ago hardened against the constant rubbing of the cords.

She sat on a thin mattress that lay across two cardboard boxes stuffed with Styrofoam balls and crushed by the weight of her body. The simple bed presented nothing with which she could construct a weapon or means to escape the tiny room. A single door made of heavy wood and sealed with big iron locks sealed her in. She knew that on the other side of the door was a four-foot wide latch that dropped into its holders either side of the door frame, making breaking the door down an utter impossibility. She had glimpsed the outside once, when her captors had applied her blindfold too hastily and left a gap for her to see through at the bottom.

That one glimpse of light had sustained her for the past four months. It had been the first thing she had seen with her own eyes in almost a year, as she had shuffled on legs weak with fatigue brought on by her meager diet of rice and unleavened bread.

She had been moved, but only occasionally. When they had abducted her from her hotel in Jabaliya in Gaza a year previously and shoved her down into the rear footwell of a battered old car, they had driven her for more than two hours, presumably to make her think that she was being transported across the border into Egypt or maybe even Israel. But she recognized the odours and sounds of Gaza like the back of her hand and knew that she was being driven round in circles. Disorientation, then. A removal of familiar psychological anchors. Standard procedure for breaking down abductees and reducing them to compliant automatons.

She had been placed in the tiny room an hour later. No questions. No food. No water. Nothing.

And that was when she had really started to worry.

Terrorists working in Gaza would normally have placed great fanfare in capturing a Western journalist. Aware of the vast international outcry that would result from such an abduction, they would have milked it for every drop of recognition that they could achieve before the final, inevitable conclusion: a prisoner release or execution. But not here.

She received no communication from any of her captors or any other human being. Food was supplied to her through a hatch in the door, always when she was asleep. It was collected in the same way. When Joanna left the food tray somewhere in her cell, it remained there untouched until she placed it on the collection shelf on the door. The latrine was periodically sprayed with cleaning fluid via a hole in the wall above it that otherwise remained sealed.

There were no words and no sounds. Ever.

She eventually realized that she was alone in a building, and that her captors merely visited her to provide food and water, nothing more. Gradually, her hair matted against her head and her clothes chafed against her skin, which became oily and slick to the touch. The inadequate diet stripped the fat from her already slim frame as though her life was physically slipping away from her, until her muscles began to feel weak and she staggered weakly about her cell.

Occasionally, at random times to avoid patterns that she could track, men would burst into her cell. They would hold her down and roughly cut her hair and trim her nails to both maintain a basic level of hygiene and also to remove any possible means of tracking the passing of time: she knew that hair grew at about half an inch per month.

She struggled to maintain track of time, determined not to lose that most essential grip on reality, yet it became impossible. Her sleep patterns became erratic, switching to a natural body rhythm of thirty-six hours instead of the more familiar twenty-four, and the mental arithmetic to keep track of the passing days eluded her. Time became an illusion, each month blurring into the next, then each week, then each hour until she was finally struck with the realization that she did not know how long she had been a captive. It could have been days.

It could have been years.

With her grasp of the passing of time taken from her, so the slow but irrevocable loss of her sanity began. Despite knowing, for sure, that she must maintain her sense of self, she found herself in the bizarre position of watching her lose her own mind. She began talking to herself to ease the burden, trying to replace the human contact that was so vital to a healthy mind, but always there was the overpowering awareness that she was, in fact, talking to herself. The conversations began to lose direction, veering into uncharted territory like dreams half remembered until she couldn’t recall whether she had been talking at all or the voices had been a product of her imagination. As the endless procession of immeasurable months drifted by in utter solitude, blind and deaf to all but her own sounds, her mind began to close in upon itself like an imploding star, shriveling and contracting until it finally blinked out into a deep and empty blackness.


The cold, silent universe that enshrouded her lasted for what felt like a millennia and yet may well have passed almost instantly. She did not sleep and yet her mind was utterly devoid of thought or awareness. She did not eat or drink. She did not move. She was both alive and dead at the same time, an empty shell of what had once been a human being now lying in her own filth and smothered with infected lesions and thick, greasy hair that stuck to her scalp like oily snakes.

They came, then.

When she did not eat or drink for several days, somewhere on the periphery of her awareness she sensed people around her. Voices coming as though from a thousand miles away and the sensation of movement, of rough hands.

She was hauled to her feet and pinned against the wall of the cell. Manacles were clamped to her wrists and ankles to hold her in place as she swayed drunkenly from a lack of spacial orientation and low blood pressure. The blindfold was yanked from her head, but the cell was poorly illuminated so that she could not see her tormentors. Her tattered clothes were stripped from her frame and a blast of water hosed across her naked body along with a handful of powdered soap tossed by one of her captors. The water and chemicals burned in her wounds as she hung limp from the manacles.

The men unchained her, dressed her in a fresh white jumpsuit and lifted her compliant body onto a gurney before strapping her blindfold back on. The wheels of the rattling gurney squeaked as they turned somewhere below, and for the first time in countless months she was wheeled out of the cell.

The journey was short, ending in another room. The sound echoes told her that the room was fairly small. A door closed behind her and she was lifted into a sitting position on what felt like a leather chair.

Then more voices, speaking Arabic.

And then a voice speaking English. With an American accent.

Pain, as a needle was slipped into her arm. A sudden jolt of energy as though adrenaline had suddenly flooded her system. Bright light as the filthy blindfold was hauled from her head, aching through her retina as she squinted against a bright orb that hovered above her. For a fleeting instant, a tiny voice buried deep in her subconscious believed that she was about to be liberated by her countrymen.

It took her only a few moments to realize that she could not move despite the resurgence of energy flooding her veins. Her eyes, so long accustomed to the dark, struggled to focus on her surroundings.

She was strapped to a chair that faced a television monitor. Headphones were in place over her ears and a single lamp above her created a halo of fearsome light that beamed down and blinded her to the rest of the room. She detected sterile odours, vastly different to those of her cell, as though she were in some kind of hospital.

‘Begin.’

The single word, the first that she had heard clearly in what felt like a year but might have only been days sounded as loud as anything she had ever heard. She tried to turn her head toward it, but pads either side of her head kept it in place. She swiveled her eyeballs sideways, but they felt odd, stiff. She tried to blink and realized that she couldn’t – her eyelids were taped open.

The television screen in front of her flickered, and then an image appeared of a group of what looked like Soviet soldiers standing to attention in front of a large missile carrier. Communist flags and banners rippled as a huge audience of soldiers stood to attention.

Even as her brain processed in a split second what she was seeing, a jolt of white pain surged like burning acid through her body. She cried out and her limbs writhed of their own accord as live current raged within her.

The image vanished and the pain ceased.

Her heart fluttered in her chest as she stared at the television screen. Another image appeared and she flinched, but this time the image was of Washington, DC, and the Capitol. A flush of warmth tingled through her body, a delirium of comfort, and she felt herself fall back into the warm, soft chair.

The screen snapped to an image of Islamic terrorists standing around a man kneeling before them, a black sack over his head and one of the terrorists holding a broad scimitar. The terrorist leaned down and drew the savage blade across the kneeling man’s throat in a spray of blood as another surge of agony burned through her body like fire. She screamed again and writhed in the seat until the image vanished.

Somewhere in her mind she knew what they were attempting to do, but she no longer had the strength to resist them.